


ad astra

by simplyprologue



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Families of Choice, M/M, Minor Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Past Child Abuse, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-07 05:23:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14664186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: Ronan did not pluck the baby from his dreams, but he plucked her name from one.The next morning, he awoke with a birth certificate in his hands.Astra Lynch-Parrish.





	ad astra

**i.**

She was whispered into existence, born from a dream and a dreamer and a forest and a magician, a slip of contradiction, a shimmer of fate. 

It happened on a Wednesday, settled comfortably in the middle of a cold January where every grey morning threatened snow. It was a Wednesday morning, and she bust into existence in shards of white and fissures of magic screaming through the ley line, zooming down from space and onto the front porch of the Barns.

“This isn’t a bird, you can’t just dream up a—”

“She’s not a dreamthing, you saw it—” 

“Then what is she? Oh no, she’s crying again.” 

It was a Wednesday, and it was inconvenient as hell, one of her fathers almost ready to drive back to Charlottesville to finish the last six months of his family medicine residency and the other desperately hungover. 

“Yeah Parrish, because she’s fucking cold. And you’re the doctor? Give her to me.” 

“She’s hungry. We need to go get — we don’t have a carseat. Can you dream up some formula or something?” 

Wrapped in a leather jacket in Ronan’s arms, she’s brought over the threshold. 

 

 

**ii.**

They don’t get around to naming her for a few days. Not until after they’ve brought her to Fox Way to be cuddled and coddled and cooed over, examined and prodded. Adam performed a medical exam on her once they brought her inside, pinched plump arms and legs, checked capillary refill, listened to the hummingbird-flutter of her heart. Declared her a bouncing baby whatever, seven pounds, five ounces, and twenty-one inches long. But the women of Fox Way were able to discern better what the  _ whatever  _ was. 

“Yours,” Calla said, her fingers smoothing down the shock of black hair on the baby’s head. 

“What?” Adam stammered. 

She rolled her eyes, gently moving baby into Blue’s empty arms. “Little Star is yours. And the Snake’s. Everything else? Matters not so much.” 

“But what  _ is  _ she?”

“A baby,” Blue scoffed, rocking the snuffling bundle. “Aren’t you the doctor, Adam?” 

“Yeah, aren’t you the doctor?” Ronan said, squeezing himself onto the couch next to Blue. Once again, he had taken to fatherhood with a casual zeal. But Ronan had been pulling living things out of his dreams for longer than his memory could reach, and so the sudden appearance of a screaming infant girl was less of a shock than it might have been. 

The baby struck Adam’s heart like a meteor, a falling star, some high-velocity object plummeting from space, cratering out a hole for herself. 

He wondered if the smoke rising from the impact could be seen in the room full of psychics. 

 

 

**iii.**

The first few nights, she slept between them in a dresser drawer padded with towels and a chair cushion, until Adam convinced himself he could leave her for a few hours (it was a question of object permanence, he found himself shaking with fear that if he closed his eyes for more than a few moments she would zip back to space or wherever magic-babies came from) and took the BMW to the closest department store and came back with the truck loaded down with many things, among them something called a Dock-A-Tot. 

_ What is she?  _

_ Yours. What is she? A baby. What is she? A gift. A gift?  _

She laid between them, chest rising and falling rapidly. Ronan and Adam argued quietly over the smudge of a nose in the middle of her face. They argued about a manner of things with wry grins, sliding into a sense of normalcy and domesticity from which they were uncertain they would be able to untangle themselves from. 

“Did you want this?” Ronan asked, spidering his fingers over baby’s stomach. She’s swaddled in the blanket Ronan dreamed for her the first night she breathed, made from an implacably soft fabric, navy blue, and dotted with shimmering and twinkling stars. 

Adam squinted in the darkness. “I didn’t… not want this. I never thought this far ahead. But she’s here. And she’s ours, she’s not going to become not-ours. I’m not… my father.” 

Ronan understood, and nodded, but his own eyes became shaded with something resembling doubt. 

“Your not your father either,” Adam whispered, laying his hand over Ronan, over the baby. 

“No bodies in the driveway,” Ronan muttered, staring furiously at their hands. 

“No bodies in the driveway.” 

They didn’t get around to naming her that night either, falling asleep in c-curved shapes around her. She was a promise, and they made promises to her. Promises of love and safety, of security and puppies and Christmases and families. Promises that she would never go hungry, never go wanting. All the things that parents promised their children with the explicit understanding that they at one point, would likely fail. 

Softly shattered promises, like cherry blossoms after the first weeks of spring. Like the crunch of snow on a silent day under a boot. Like the slamming of a car door on a moonless night. 

 

 

**iv.**

Ronan did not pluck the baby from his dreams, but he plucked her name from one. 

The next morning, he awoke with a birth certificate in his hands. 

Astra Lynch-Parrish.

 

 

**v.**

“Star Baby, Star Baby, Star Baby,” Gansey chanted, looking far too comfortable with a baby on his hip. “Don’t worry, Star Baby, I’ll be here to teach you how to behave like a responsible human being.” 

Adam is in Charlottesville at the hospital for an eight-hour shift in the family clinic and then a twelve-hour shift on-call for the Emergency Department and Gansey is in Henrietta for the next six weeks before his trip to explore a newly-active ley line in the Amazon, making him Ronan’s on-call babysitter. 

This was not Ronan’s decision, but Gansey’s. 

And Adam’s, if he was pressed.

And Blue’s. 

And Henry supported it. 

“I will revoke godfather status, Uncle Dickhead,” Ronan grumbled, flinging his arm over his eyes. He never slept much, but with a four-month old baby screaming through cutting her first tooth, he’s now getting none at all. 

When Gansey arrived at the Barns that morning he found Ronan singing nonsense as he paced the kitchen, an unhappy baby sniffling against his shoulder, the opposite-white black of Unmaking dripping from one nostril. Gansey had taken Astra from him immediately and shooed him to bed.  _ Dream something pretty for the pretty girl. We’ll be fine. I’ll call Fox Way if I need help, but Uncle Gansey doesn’t need help.  _

And to his credit, he’d managed fine on his own with the plausibly human baby of questionable magical provenance. 

“But then who would babysit?” he asked Ronan, doing laps around the couch as Astra munched on a frozen washcloth, content for the moment. 

“Someone who can stay in the country for more than two months at a time?” Ronan said with a scowl. “You missed the  _ birth  _ of your first and only niece.” 

_ That  _ had been quite the phone call from Jane. Ronan and Adam had a baby  _ how?  _ After being assured no kidnapping had taken place, he’d booked his return flight to Virginia. “Helen is married, you do remember? You were there? Against your will?”

“Are you saying her kids count more than mine?” 

“No.” Gansey coughed. The tiny girl on his hip pitched forward when her blue eyes found her father, one arm reaching out for him. Afraid that Astra’s moment of contentment would end and the Barns would, once again, fill with the dulcet tones of a miserable baby, he placed her carefully onto Ronan’s chest. “Speaking of birth, though—”

Ronan wrapped his arms protectively around Astra, who settled again, safe in her father’s  _ don’t-fucking-try-me  _ grip. A bolt of warmth pierced Gansey’s chest at the sight. 

“No.” 

“You have to wonder,” Gansey said. He did wonder — and he’d already consulted several of his contacts around the globe. 

“I really don’t.”

“I do,” he said, sitting in an overstuffed armchair catty-corner to the sofa near Ronan’s head, and immediately found himself in the crosshairs of one of Ronan’s truly most Ronan-like glares. “What, doesn’t make her less yours. All magic has rules. I don’t want to risk anything with breaking hers.” Ronan continued to glare, then kissed the top of Astra’s black-haired head. “Have you taken her to Cabeswater? See what it has to say?” 

“No,” he spat out, looking as intimidating as one can with an infant in a soft yellow onesie on one’s chest. “I don’t trust the fucking place.” 

“You’re the one who dreamed it, Ronan.” 

It wasn’t that he and Adam never went to the new Cabeswater — they all did. It was that they didn’t want to bring Astra there, not when her skull was not fused, not when her mind was not formed, not when she couldn’t even lift her head up on her own. It was their job as her parents to protect her. For the first time since that time he called the  _ before,  _ Ronan did not want to be a weapon. 

No bodies in the driveway. 

“Yeah, so I don’t fucking trust it. It’s not what it used to be, and what it used to be was still dangerous, we all know that. I’m not risking her.” He cradled the soft fontinelle under Astra’s scalp. “What? She’s here. What does it matter how. Cabeswater’s gifts have a price. You should know that. You  _ do  _ know that, you dumbfuck asshole.”

Gansey threaded his fingers together. “We don’t know that Cabeswater made her.” 

“What else, Dick?” he asked, sounding genuinely tired once more. “She’s not a dreamthing. Something else manifested her into being.”

 

 

**vi.**

_ Something else  _ was pushed to the back of Ronan’s mind — all of their minds, set aside in a gleaming box reserved for all things debated about Astra’s miraculous and wondrous and confusing existence — when Adam finished his Residency in Charlottesville in June and got the news that he passed his boards two weeks after that. 

_ Something else  _ is Adam pausing in the half-second before introducing Ronan and Astra to his colleagues at the reception the hospital throws for them. 

_ Something else  _ is Adam saying to everyone they meet dressed in their sleek gowns and pressed suits with relieved exhausted smiles on their faces and champagne in their hands, “this is my husband, Ronan, and our daughter.”  _ Something else  _ is in Adam’s exhausted smile and the champagne in his hand.  _ Something else  _ is Ronan sharp eyes sharpening, fixed on him with pride and wonder and a question. 

_ Something else  _ is Ronan strapping Astra into her carseat and then pinning Adam against the hood of the BMW.

“You wanna marry me, Parrish?”

Adam’s mouth turned up into a half grin. “Thought you’d never ask, Lynch.” 

When they kissed, it was no wonder that from  _ something else  _ a star baby had been born. 

 

 

**vii.**

At the courthouse they decided on Lynch-Parrish. Not Parrish-Lynch. 

So the three of them matched. 

A set. 

 

 

**viii.**

Opal came home to visit from the many worlds she lived between now that she was declared grown — Cabeswater the Second and Fox Way and the Dittley Cave and all the other magical-safe places along the ley line and in her dreams. 

Not for the first time since Astra was born-manifested-made, but for the first time since Astra’s gurgles and cries turned into babbles and almost-words. Opal loved her star sister, spun her in her favorite circles through the fields, introduced her to all the cows and barn cats who made Astra squawk with glee, flapping her arms. 

Opal turned, and saw Ronan stalking towards them with a white bonnet in his hands, Adam a few paces behind them, hands jammed into the pockets of his shorts. 

“Kerah!” she squawked, like Astra. 

“Her skin’s delicate as shit, you can’t just take her outside in this heat without — it may be September but it’s still,” he grumbled, arranging the bonnet over Astra’s dark curls, casting protective shadows on her pale-pink skin. Astra looked up at him (mostly because she had not yet spotted Adam) her face now approximately eighty percent cherubic cheeks and big blue eyes. 

“Ke-rah, Ke-rah, Ke-rah!” she called, trying to bounce herself out of Opal’s arms. 

Opal joined into the chant, not understanding why Kerah had suddenly gone so pale, why Adam’s face had erupted into a glorious thunderstorm of a smile. Ronan appeared to be having a small coronary, moving to lean over the gate to an empty horse paddock for support. 

Adam took Astra from her arms, swinging her in her favorite circles before bringing their faces close and placing a kiss on the tip of Astra’s nose that was as light as a butterfly landing on a flower. “That’s right sugar, that’s Kerah. Just like the birdie and Opal say it. Can you say that again? Ke-rah.”

She obliged.

“Now what about Daddy? He can be Ke-rah, I’ll be your Daddy. Da-da. Daaaaa-da.” 

Astra giggled, satisfied with her choice for her first word and its substantive affect on her fathers. “Ke-rah.”

“Ah, close,” Adam said good naturedly. 

“You bastard,” Ronan gasped. 

 

 

**ix.**

Several things happened the month Astra Lynch-Parrish turned one: Adam took over the practice at the Henrietta Family Clinic, Blue accepted Gansey’s eleventh proposal of marriage, and Astra awoke one morning with soft raven plush toy in her chubby hand. One that had not been there the night before, or any night before. 

“I guess she really is mine,” Ronan droned, examining the toy. 

For not the first time, Adam doubted that there was anything of himself in his daughter, or if the forces that made her had only taken bits and pieces of Ronan and assembled them into a seven pound, five ounce baby girl. His face creased with — not worry, as a precise word. He loved Astra. Astra was his and Ronan’s daughter. Those were non-negotiable facts. 

Unlike Ronan, he still wondered about the morning Astra shimmered into existence. 

He was always waiting for the things he loved to be taken away, for the people he loved to slip from his grasp, no matter how willing he would be to die in their place. 

Astra spent her first birthday well-loved and well-attended to by the whole of her family at the Barns — the women of Fox Way, the appropriate Ganseys, the remnants of the Vancouver contingent who remained in proximity by way of DC political careers, Matthew. And to mostly just Ronan’s surprise, Declan, with his most recent wife. 

And even—

_ And even— _

(And even, despite neither acquisition of a child nor a marriage announcement was placed anywhere in a paper or online, a present appeared with a return address to the trailer park with a card signed from Grandmother Parrish. Adam stood frozen at the mailbox, staring down at the parcel. 

Ronan took it from his shaking hands, and said: “They don’t get to have this part of your life.” 

Adam did not know what became of it after that, and did not ask.)

Some things Adam was better off putting down and backing away from, allowing his mind to focus on Astra in her high chair, smashing chocolate cake into her face as the adults in her life took pictures and laughed in delight, her face a mirror of their happiness and approval. And Adam took a breath, and was at peace. 

His parents, his childhood, had no domain here. It would, when it could be, be eclipsed by what he and Ronan gave to Astra, hand over fist.

It was its own kind of magic. 

It was something else.

It was love. 

Adam blinked. And then, his brain reached something close to understanding.

Ten years ago, Adam sworn to be Cabeswater’s hands and eyes. Then: everything that happened. The Unmaker was unmade, Cabeswater was unmade. Then: everything was born again by Ronan and by Adam, but the magic had never died, because the Dreamer and the Magician had always kept it alive. 

_ Something else.  _

 

 

**x.**

Astra held both of their hands, toddling through the tall grass. The trees around them whispered, leaves reaching out to glance their hair and arms and legs. Astra looked up at them not with wonder or with glee, but with the single-minded determination of a willful toddler.  

Astra was eighteen months old.

Astra was entering Cabeswater for the first time like a monarch on progress of her domain, her Kerah on her right side and her Daddy on her left. Greywaren and Magician. Her protectors for the rest of time.

_ Per aspera ad astra,  _ the trees whispered, vines caressing her cheek, assembling into a circlet upon her head.  _ Per aspera ad astra per aspera ad astra per aspera ad astra. _

Then:  _ gratias tibi.  _

There are rules to magic: all gifts have a price. 

Once upon a time, the Cabeswater took, and then it gave. Then, came the after, when the Greywaren and the Magician put it back together anew, and better, and stronger. Cabeswater took what it needed from them. Then it gave: a star baby on a cold winter morning. All human, all girl, half a dreamer and half a sacrifice. All the best things that they had ever loved. She was creation wrought from destruction, an opposite-echo of the unmaker made into flesh, a promise bound in pink flesh and blue eyes and squalling lungs and most importantly  _ — _ a savior for a place, for a people, who had once been in danger.

She wasn’t born, but made.

_ Deus ex machina.  _

The forest bent before them. The wheel turned, the cycle continued. And Adam and Ronan would be at her side. 

_ Make way for the Raven Princess!  _

**Author's Note:**

>  **A/N:** I finished reading The Raven Cycle two days ago which means I immediately had to put a baby in it. Thank you for putting up with my nonsense. 
> 
> Per aspera ad astra = through difficulties to the stars  
> Gratias tibi = thank you  
> Deus ex machina = god from machine 
> 
> Adam's a family medicine doctor because it feels right to me? I went with the name Astra because it felt like close enough of an homage to Aurora without being a direct naming-after situation. "Noa" was also a contender but I... have plans. And Astra calls Ronan "Kerah", I don't make the rules. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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